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Rating: 
Summary: This is a darn good book on car audio!
Review:
In the automotive how-to book market, there aren't a lot of good titles on car stereo. That shortage makes High Performance Car Stereo by Joe Pettitt, which would be a good read even if the market was crowded, an important reference on the subject.
The book's best quality is that it's written by a car audio DIY and is aimed at do-it-yourself car audio enthusiasts. Joe Pettitt is a long-time automotive technical writer who's worked at many of the major performance car and truck magazines and has written for "Autotronics". He is is currently on staff at Sport Truck Magazine. Another good quality of this book is Author, Pettitt, and Publisher, CarTech Books' S-A Design division, made a conscious decision to leave discussions of basic electrical and audio theory to other titles which better cover those subjects. High-Performance Car Stereo focuses on teaching the intermediate car stereo DIY the technical information he or she needs to upgrade or build-from-scratch most any automotive sound system. Now, this means the reader must bring a fair amount of technical knowledge to the table when reading this book, but that's a good thing as it forces the technically-challenged to other, more basic texts, first. Regardless of whether you want to just install improved speakers and an EQ in your existing system or add all-new and better equipment just for pleasure or build a totally-killer, mega-power, custom audio masterpiece for IASCA competition, you'll find information in this book. It's got chapters on head units, amps, speakers, EQs and a lot more. Appropriately, the book ends with a chapter profiling two installations: a 92 Chevy pick-up and an 84 Pontiac Firebird. All of this is written in Pettitt's easy-going, sometimes humorous style. While I have a basic knowledge of electronics and audio technology, I was not well-versed in advanced car stereo subjects, so I learned a lot of useful information in reading this book. Before I read it, I knew enough about car audio to be dangerous. When I finished the book, I felt I knew enough to build a pretty decent system. Now, all I need is a bunch of money to do it. While High-Performance Car Stereo is a really good book, it falls short of being an outstanding one because of problems with graphics and pictures. There are a lot of charts and diagrams in it, few of which are numbered. This is a problem when the text refers to a specific drawing but the reader, who might be learning the subject the first time, cannot tell which drawing is being identified. I was confused by this problem several times. There are places in the book where pictures are published in the wrong orientation. There were a few instances of images not matching captions. A fair amount of the pictures in the last chapter, which could have been the most valuable images in the book, are too small to usefully illustrate the activity or situation the Author intended to show. It would have been better to either use less images or devote more space to that final chapter so the photos could have run larger. The last little quirk of this book was the cover. The largest picture on it shows the interior of a Corvette with a killer sound system installed in place of the stock stereo. Unfortunately, all you get is a picture. There is nothing in the book specific to high-end car audio in Corvettes. Hopefully, if there's a second edition of High-Performance Car Stereo, it will have an enlarged section on installations along with some material about the Corvette system pictured on the cover. In the meantime, if you're looking to learn about how to understand, select and install high-end car stereo equipment, buy this book.
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